An Eagle Scout, Thomas M. Martin took on cleaning up an old red train caboose as a service project. “He remodeled it to make it where people could go inside. If you saw it before and looked in it after he was through – it was daylight and dark”, said his former principal, Robert Martin, who is no relation. “Tom was involved in Key Club, German Club and band, making All-Region Band his sophomore year”, said Robert Martin. “He was a wonderful young man. Those that knew him knew he was funny and outgoing.”

Lt. Martin died in Al Busayifi, Iraq of wounds sustained from small-arms fire when insurgents attacked his unit during combat operations. He enlisted in the Army in 1998 after graduating high school and served in Korea before accepting an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 2005.

“He was very polite and respectful. I can’t think of him ever overreacting; he had a wonderful, good-natured personality”, said Pat Hagge, a family friend. “It’s a terrible tragedy; he was a great young man.”

Lt. Thomas Martin is survived by his parents, Edmund and Candis.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

WORKING out last Monday, I heard a campaign flunky on TV insist that progress in Iraq is an illusion. “The war isn’t over until all of the troops come home!” she grumped.Guess we’re still at war with Germany. And Japan. Even Italy. Oh, and let’s not forget all of our military bases occupying the Confederacy.

The poor woman knew nothing about warfare, history – or Iraq. She just wanted to see her candidate win in November and wasn’t going to let reality get in the way.And one look told you she didn’t even know any “troops.”

But after my initial shrug (back to the bench for more crunches), it struck me how wrong I’d been on a point I’d argued for two decades: I claimed that Western societies have an advantage because of their insistence on factual data.

Yet, since 9/11, I’ve seen and heard no end of my fellow citizens’ arguing from blind passion and utterly refusing to ingest facts that didn’t match their prejudices (left or right). Since the turnabout in Iraq began a year and a half ago, the rejection of reality has become an outright pathology for the quit-Iraq-and-free-the-terrorists set.

I’ve watched millions of my countrymen and countrywomen insist that fantasies are real. In a classic through-the-looking-glass reversal last year, Sen. Hillary Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus, the man who turned Iraq around, that his reports of progress were fairy tales. It was the world turned upside down.

Since that woman on TV “explained” victory last Monday, I’ve thought about the different kinds of people who refuse either to accept that the situation in Iraq has improved remarkably or that quitting now would have serious consequences.

When I break down the “fairy tales can come true” crowd, the first division is into vendors and consumers. Determined to elect the president of its choice, the “mainstream” media has collapsed into outright lies and whopping distortions. And, of course, political hacks will do anything to get their candidate elected.

It’s the consumers of fairy tales – those desperate to believe – who are more interesting. They come in several basic flavors, two of which we can quickly set aside:

Protesting university students. Don’t worry about them. Once they graduate and get a dose of reality, most of the kids will do fine. The need for liberal-arts undergrads to prance to the left is virtually hormonal.

Hollywood stars and other celebrities. No worries there, either. Just check out the box-office receipts for the dozen or so self-righteous anti-war (anti-military) films. These folks are so far removed from reality that they believe the roles they play give them genuine expertise. Don’t get irate – just laugh. (Coming soon: Susan Sarandon on quantum physics!)

But there’s another sad bunch:

My generation. Those of us from our mid-50s into early 60s. The florid youth of yesteryear who declared they were going to change the world, made a mess others had to clean up – and the high point of whose lives came in a protest march down University Boulevard, chanting, “Ho-ho-ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!”

The key to understanding the aging activists’ bitterness toward the military (disguised as concern for the common soldier) and their obsession with the rights of terrorists is that this cobbled-together cause gives them one last chance to rise above their disappointing lives and to recapture, for one Viagra-assisted moment, their glory days of raised little fists and bell-bottoms.Reality proved bitter for this bunch. In an infuriating turnabout, it was the nerds in the comp-science classes, the geeks with punch cards in their shirt pockets, who changed the world (and became billionaires). It just doesn’t seem fair that the folks with multiple degrees in Comparative Literature ended up, at best, with tenure at an obscure college, serial divorces and a failed book or two.

My generation’s sense of entitlement is, of course, legendary. But most of us got jobs and got on with our lives. Only a soured minority never got over that brief moment in the sun before the communes fell apart because someone had to do the dishes (and pay for the penicillin).

Just as no evidence was ever going to convince them that Communists might not all be virtuous, nothing is going to convince them that Iraq is emerging as a better place, for its own people and for us, than it was under Saddam Hussein. They need to believe that our country, having failed to recognize their innate greatness, is wrong.

I’d pity them, if the stakes weren’t so high.

If aging activists really want to change the world for the better, facing reality would be a great first step. Magic beanstalks don’t really grow into the clouds. That’s still a minivan, pal, before and after midnight. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t always make it safely home to the Upper West Side.

In an April 8, 2008 article titled “Apology to the Valiant American Soldier,” Iraqi liberal Khudayr Taher bemoaned the ill treatment the U.S. army received from those it liberated:

“We forsook you and betrayed you – we, whose history is an expression of massacres, conflagrations, and ruin. We killed you, and we killed our dream and aspiration of reaching the sun, the moon, and the stars – [we killed our dream] of availing ourselves of the opportunity to live as true humans, thanks to your presence.”

“My dear, brave American soldier, you noble individual who traversed land and sea in order to write the story of Iraqi freedom for the first time in its modern history – you believed, in accordance with logic, self-evident truths, and rational thought, that a people who had been subjected to repression, starvation, and killing would dance for joy, and would thank Allah who sent you to them as a liberating angel. [You believed that] they would strew flowers and break out in songs of joy that would smash the chains of slavery, ignominy, and humiliation.”

Not even a writer of surrealistic [literature] or [theater of] the absurd would have imagined that the Iraqi people would revolt against their liberator and would rush ardently back to a new bondage of a different kind – that of the religious cleric, the tribal sheikh, and the gang leader. It was unthinkable that the people would go against logic, rational thought, and self-evident truths, in a mad rush towards the abyss and total ruin.”

My beloved, brave American soldier, we apologize to you, and we are saddened at our wretched and miserable selves. Since we are a people that slaughters itself, and kills one another, cutting off heads, what can you expect from us other than ingratitude, perfidy, and stabbing you in the back for the benefit of Iranian and Syrian intelligence and Al-Qaeda?…”

~Snooper~Thank God for the internet that Gore made! A special transcript can be found at Newsbusters.The former (thank God) President, Bill Clinton, “didn’t keep all of his speeches” but, some of us have and, we, The Rabid Right Wing Steam Rollers know how to “Google It”. This tid-bit is just too much. Today, on the CBS Early Show with Harry Smith, a softball interview with Bill Clinton went south.

Harry Smith said, “When you were in Muscatine a week and a half or so ago, right, and said, I’ve always been against this, speaking about the Iraq war, I did a little Googling last night, and the best I could tell was you said the weapons inspectors should be allowed to do their jobs.”

That’s the best this asshat could do? No wonder the Lame Stream Media is in such shambles! Here, at A Newt One, we will do what the Lame Stream should be doing. we have, at our beckon call, the internet that Gore made therein, all manner OF “things” can be found. We “Googled It” and found…GASP! Bill Clinton LIED!! This is Clinton’s answer, like it was the truth or something:

Look, I said something like that a hundred times. I supported threatening Saddam so we could do the inspections. The mistake we made was not letting the inspections finish. If they had, there would have been no war. And I was always against doing it without the inspections. As you pointed out, most of my speeches weren’t getting covered by the press and we didn’t copy them or anything back then. But we do have several records, including one six days before the invasion, where I said, I don’t think they should do this until the inspections finished. That was the deal. And, if we’d done it, there would have been no war.

“If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear: We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. We have to defend our future from these predators of the twenty-first century. They’ll be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.

“Saddam is gone, and good riddance,” former President Clinton said yesterday. Clinton also said Bush should not be faulted if banned weapons of mass destruction aren’t found. Said the president, “I don’t think you can criticize the president for trying to act on the belief that they have a substantial amount of chemical and biological stock. That is what I was always told.”

WHAT? That is what he had always been told? Was that a slip of ye ole tongue? Is that the data Sandy Burglar Berger stole? WHAT? Bats in the belfry and the sound of crickets.

I supported the president when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

OOPS! I wonder if the salary Harry Smith is receiving is commensurate with his inability to “Google It”. If his pay is any more than $2 per year, heads should roll. Try this: Google Bill Clinton and Iraq War…let me know what you come up with. K?

So you’re sitting there as president, you’re reeling in the aftermath of 9/11, so, yeah, you want to go get Bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that, but you also have to say, well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I gotta do that. That’s why I supported the Iraq thing.

The Iraq thing? The Iraq thing? I cannot believe that he would actually say that. The Iraq thing. I never want to hear any more whining about GWB’s pronunciation problems or quips about his Texas swagger. The Iraq thing?

The man is a pathological liar. No ifs ands or buts. The Clintons are the Darlings of The Media and always have been. They represent the epitome of socialistic America so richly pined after and lustfully desirous to bring to the United States.Over. My. Dead. Body.A note from El Rushbo:

[…] He just got away with lying again on the CBS Early Show because their researchers couldn’t find anything other than Clinton talking about weapons inspectors when they Googled. I find it just breathtaking, folks, I do, at how incompetent the Drive-By Media is. They can’t do anything right, and they don’t want to. They don’t want to get it right where the Clintons are concerned. […]

~Snooper~Thank God for the internet that Gore made! A special transcript can be found at Newsbusters.The former (thank God) President, Bill Clinton, “didn’t keep all of his speeches” but, some of us have and, we, The Rabid Right Wing Steam Rollers know how to “Google It”. This tid-bit is just too much. Today, on the CBS Early Show with Harry Smith, a softball interview with Bill Clinton went south.

Harry Smith said, “When you were in Muscatine a week and a half or so ago, right, and said, I’ve always been against this, speaking about the Iraq war, I did a little Googling last night, and the best I could tell was you said the weapons inspectors should be allowed to do their jobs.”

That’s the best this asshat could do? No wonder the Lame Stream Media is in such shambles! Here, at A Newt One, we will do what the Lame Stream should be doing. we have, at our beckon call, the internet that Gore made therein, all manner OF “things” can be found. We “Googled It” and found…GASP! Bill Clinton LIED!! This is Clinton’s answer, like it was the truth or something:

Look, I said something like that a hundred times. I supported threatening Saddam so we could do the inspections. The mistake we made was not letting the inspections finish. If they had, there would have been no war. And I was always against doing it without the inspections. As you pointed out, most of my speeches weren’t getting covered by the press and we didn’t copy them or anything back then. But we do have several records, including one six days before the invasion, where I said, I don’t think they should do this until the inspections finished. That was the deal. And, if we’d done it, there would have been no war.

“If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear: We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. We have to defend our future from these predators of the twenty-first century. They’ll be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.

“Saddam is gone, and good riddance,” former President Clinton said yesterday. Clinton also said Bush should not be faulted if banned weapons of mass destruction aren’t found. Said the president, “I don’t think you can criticize the president for trying to act on the belief that they have a substantial amount of chemical and biological stock. That is what I was always told.”

WHAT? That is what he had always been told? Was that a slip of ye ole tongue? Is that the data Sandy Burglar Berger stole? WHAT? Bats in the belfry and the sound of crickets.

I supported the president when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

OOPS! I wonder if the salary Harry Smith is receiving is commensurate with his inability to “Google It”. If his pay is any more than $2 per year, heads should roll. Try this: Google Bill Clinton and Iraq War…let me know what you come up with. K?

So you’re sitting there as president, you’re reeling in the aftermath of 9/11, so, yeah, you want to go get Bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that, but you also have to say, well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I gotta do that. That’s why I supported the Iraq thing.

The Iraq thing? The Iraq thing? I cannot believe that he would actually say that. The Iraq thing. I never want to hear any more whining about GWB’s pronunciation problems or quips about his Texas swagger. The Iraq thing?

The man is a pathological liar. No ifs ands or buts. The Clintons are the Darlings of The Media and always have been. They represent the epitome of socialistic America so richly pined after and lustfully desirous to bring to the United States.Over. My. Dead. Body.A note from El Rushbo:

[…] He just got away with lying again on the CBS Early Show because their researchers couldn’t find anything other than Clinton talking about weapons inspectors when they Googled. I find it just breathtaking, folks, I do, at how incompetent the Drive-By Media is. They can’t do anything right, and they don’t want to. They don’t want to get it right where the Clintons are concerned. […]